Attachments are not working

[Gandalf Parker]

It is rather amazing that they allow attachments so freely. Screenshots, joke graphics, game saves. Some are HUGE. There are tons of attachments from years ago. Even games that arent carried by Shrapnel anymore.

[Mindi]

Argh! They have worked intermittently actually. We've fixed this problem twice in the last week and a half or so and somehow it keeps getting changed back which breaks it. I'll have Richard fix it again while we are still hunting down the issue.

[lch]

Gandalf Parker said:
It is rather amazing that they allow attachments so freely. Screenshots, joke graphics, game saves. Some are HUGE. There are tons of attachments from years ago. Even games that arent carried by Shrapnel anymore.

The strange thing is just that everybody wonders about these errors and reports them in their threads, but nobody investigates why they happen. I am quite sure that it could be because of something as simple as a full disk. Who is the admin for this server? Why isn't there even a forum about the Shrapnel forums itself? (unless this forum is meant for that)

[Mindi]

Dude, chill. First off, we were aware of the attachments problem and have been working on it. As Gandalf said however, attachments are somewhat of a luxury on any forum. This specific forum is a forum for Shrapnel itself and people can report issues here and we are aware of several issues, although most people report issues directly to me.

However, there are some things that were broken when we did the last upgrade because we did a lot of custom work to get certain features to work that were considered important to the community. Some of them still don't work 100% correctly, but they allowed those with certain formats to continue using those formats. At this point, those things are not a priority as we will not be continuing to use this software package in the future and the at some point the Law of Dimishing Returns kicks in.

[capnq]

Mindi said: At this point, those things are not a priority as we will not be continuing to use this software package in the future and the at some point the Law of Dimishing Returns kicks in.

Now you've piqued my curiosity as to why you plan to stop using UBB. These forums have the best publically available BBS interface of any of the boards I visit regularly.

[Gandalf Parker]

capnq said:

Now you've piqued my curiosity as to why you plan to stop using UBB. These forums have the best publically available BBS interface of any of the boards I visit regularly.

Have you used other boards with UBB? Board with expensive forum software are rare.

Usually people like it because all of the boards they visit are free-code boards, and one UBB board. In that case yes it usually comes out ahead. But when compared to other pay-for boards its not necessarily on top.

[lch]

Well, about the interface thing, I really don't like how much you'll have to do manually with the bbcode tags in UBB. With phpBB you just select some text in your textarea, click on "bold" or "code" or "url" or whatever, and voila, the text is encased in those tags. For this board, you have to fill out some popup dialogs and then the result is just added to the end of the textarea. The Javascript from phpBB is smarter, and because of that I usually type the bbcode tags by hand here.

P.S.: Oh yeah, I'm german. I have to nag!

[capnq]

Gandalf Parker said:

Have you used other boards with UBB? Board with expensive forum software are rare.

Usually people like it because all of the boards they visit are free-code boards, and one UBB board. In that case yes it usually comes out ahead. But when compared to other pay-for boards its not necessarily on top.

Besides Shrapnel, I regularly visit forums that use vBulletin, Jive, and Drupal. I don't know if those three are free, but they are IMO the three worst BBS interfaces I've ever used.
I have in the past visited other forums that used some flavor of UBB.

[Gandalf Parker]

I use free code myself. They have great power and grat capbility to personalize it. But it does have its pros and cons. One of the drawbacks is that its "do it yourself". You usually cant pay for installs and migrations. Also there is the security issue. Its sometimes a chioice between security or having someone you can hold responsible for security problems.

[capnq]

capnq said: Besides Shrapnel, I regularly visit forums that use vBulletin, Jive, and Drupal.

Forgot one. Another site I visit regularly uses phpBB. I like that forum almost as much as this one.